Jewish Organizations Urged to Involve College Youth in Their Work

Jewish community life suffers an “irreparable loss” by its failure to involve Jewish college youth in its affairs, Rabbi Benjamin M.Kahn, national director of B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, said yesterday. He called this neglect “one of the great shortcomings of Jewish organizational life.”

American Jewry gives “too little attention to the need of developing among our young people a sense of involvement in the Jewish community, in the Jewish people and in Jewish destiny, ” Rabbi Kahn said in a speech at the University of Southern California. “We also fail to facilitate their transition from the campus into the mainstream of the community. “

As a result, he said, after college the Jewish graduate is not readily inclined to affiliate with Jewish organizational life, “a delay in involvement that is an irreparable loss to the Jewish community. ” He asked that national Jewish organizations make it a “deliberate policy” to have “scores of Jewish college youth at conventions and conferences so that they can be exposed to the concern of Jewish life and the Jewish people, which we hope will some day be theirs. “

The Hillel national director also criticized the “step-child treatment” given to programs of Jewish education for the college community, comparing the average of $100 a year spent by American Jewry on primary Jewish schooling for each youngster with “less than $10 a year to advance the Jewish Knowledge of the college student. ” Predicting that within a few years 80 per cent of the Jewish college youth will be attending schools of higher learning, he urged that the community give “greater attention and better financing ” to Jewish education for this group.